Thursday, May 24, 2012

Obama Taps Allison MacFarlane as New Head of Nuclear Regulatory Commission

President Barack Obama has nominated Allison Macfarlane to be the new head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Macfarlane is currently an associate professor at George Mason
University in Fairfax, VA, and was part of Obama’s Blue Ribbon
Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, a panel that was, among its
responsibilities, asked to examine how the country should deal with its
growing nuclear waste storage crisis. She holds a PhD in Geology from
MIT.

As predicted, in choosing Macfarlane, Obama tapped someone who is on
record as opposed to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
Macfarlane quite literally wrote the book on the subject–she is the
editor (along with Rodney Ewing) of Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste,
a review that is predominantly very critical of the choice of the Yucca
site. Because confirmation has to move through the Senate, it would
need the consent of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), a longtime
opponent of the Yucca project.

In terms of nuclear energy, I would
describe myself as an agnostic. I’m neither pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear.
I think nuclear has been doing a good job in the United states and some
other industrial countries at providing a good, reliable energy, and
they’ve been improving on that. At the same time, I think I think in
terms of an expansion in nuclear power over the next 50 years or
something, nuclear has lot of liabilities and I don’t know if it can get
over them.

If Macfarlane has objections to the expansion of commercial nuclear power, it would seem to be based on the cost–as she explained in a 2007 MIT lecture–and issues of waste storage.

To that second problem, Macfarlane is on record as favoring so-called
interim solutions. As explained to me by Beyond Nuclear’s Kevin Kamps,
who has met with Dr. Macfarlane, the NRC nominee thinks dry cask storage
is “good enough” for now, and is in favor of “centralized interim
storage”–a plan to collect spent fuel form the nation’s nuclear plants
and move it to a handful of regional, above-ground storage facilities
until some unspecified time in the future when a long-term program is
completed.

Sites rumored for possible interim storage facilities include the
Utah desert, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Dresden
nuclear facility in Illinois. The state governments of New Mexico and
Arizona have also made moves to request they be considered as
repositories for nuclear waste.

The problems with dry casks and centralized interim storage are many.
Kamps, a longtime critic of standard dry cask storage, notes that
current dry casks are built to shield workers from radiation, but not
designed to withstand long-term exposure to the environment or to
survive a hostile attack. Some of the nation’s casks already show signs
of wear, cracking, and corrosion. Beyond Nuclear recommends hardened dry
casks–something different from standard casks–for this level of
storage.

Kamps was unsure what Macfarlane’s position was on requiring
hardened dry casks.

There are massive security concerns around the idea of centralized
interim storage, too. Not only would the facilities themselves be
potential targets for terrorist attack, the transportation of nuclear
waste would be vulnerable. And, it should be noted, as currently
conceived, centralized sites would necessitate transport of waste
through densely populated areas over insecure stretches of rail lines.

Kamps was also dismayed over Macfarlane’s enthusiasm for the Onkalo
spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland. The underground facility,
still under construction on Onkiluoto Island, has come under scrutiny by
nuclear watchdogs for some of the same reasons critics worry about
Yucca Mountain.

Because of the unavailability of
off-site storage for spent power-reactor fuel, the NRC has allowed
high-density storage of spent fuel in pools originally designed to hold
much smaller inventories. As a result, virtually all U.S. spent-fuel
pools have been re-racked to hold spent-fuel assemblies at densities
that approach those in reactor cores. In order to prevent the spent fuel
from going critical, the fuel assemblies are partitioned off from each
other in metal boxes whose walls contain neutron-absorbing boron. It has
been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water
in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in
such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a
reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the
zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission
products, including 30-year half-life 137Cs, would be released. The fire
could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination
consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those
from Chernobyl.

Of course, recent events in Fukushima have shown Macfarlane et al
to be eerily on target. No doubt, Macfarlane would at least like to see
spent fuel moved out of pools (even if it is to dry casks) to bring the
density down to original design parameters. Whether Macfarlane will
feel inclined to push the nuclear industry in this direction is another
matter. Kevin Kamps estimates that moving spent fuel from pools to dry
casks would cost roughly $100 million per facility, and cost has been a
principle reason nuclear operators have dragged their heels on
transferring older spent fuel to dry storage. To date, about 75 percent
of the nation’s spent fuel remains in liquid pools.

Heartening, too, when it comes to this mother lode of radioactive
waste, is word that Allison Macfarlane has been critical of nuclear fuel
reprocessing. As discussed here many times, reprocessing is expensive,
energy intensive, and actually creates more nuclear waste, not less.

The nomination of Macfarlane no doubt signals a deal between Sen.
Reid and the White House. Reid, for his part, praised Macfarlane, and
announced plans to hold confirmation hearings alongside those for
Kristine Svinicki, the sitting NRC commissioner re-nominated by Obama
but publicly opposed by Reid. According to the Majority Leader, both
nominations will be considered next month.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, an
industry group, called Macfarlane “an active contributor to policy
debates in the nuclear energy field for many years” and urged the Senate
to confirm her nomination as soon as possible.

“It would not serve the public interest to have her nomination
linger,” the group said.

“We urge the Senate to confirm both
Commissioner Svinicki and Professor Macfarlane expeditiously.”

As noted with the news of Jaczko’s resignation, the problems of
nuclear power transcend the role of any individual. The dirt and
danger–and most notably the costs–that come with nuclear power do not
change with the personnel of the NRC. And, though it seems hard to
imagine, the problems of regulatory capture loom even larger. The only
reason Macfarlane is being discussed is because the nuclear industry
grew tired of Gregory Jaczko. That the industry and their political pals
were successful in pushing out one regulator cannot bode well for
another that is in the least bit inclined to regulate.